The stupidest story of the summer may be over. Finally, mercifully.
Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire and chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc. META, -1.34%, on Sunday appeared to pull the grown-up card — or at least the less-immature card — to scuttle a cage fight with Elon Musk, the even richer billionaire, Tesla Inc. TSLA, -1.10% CEO and X owner.
From the start, it was a story that appeared to live mostly in Musk’s imagination. Yet it still sparked a media frenzy, as the prospect of two emotionally stunted billionaires publicly pummeling each other was not without some appeal.
But the proposed MMA-style fight apparently met its demise the same way it was born — through a lot of online bluster.
Weeks after proposing the fight, then resorting to multiple delaying tactics while noting how out of shape and unprepared he was, Musk apparently reached out to Zuckerberg over the weekend asking for a “practice bout” first.
Author and journalist Walter Isaacson — who is currently writing a biography of Musk — tweeted a text exchange Sunday that he said Musk had sent him.
“Wanna do a practice bout at your house next week?” a text apparently from Musk reads. The reply, purportedly from Zuckerberg: “If you still want to do a real MMA fight, then you should train on your own and let me know when you’re ready to compete. I don’t want to keep hyping something that will never happen, so you should either decide you’re going to do this and do it soon, or we should move on.”
Zuckerberg later posted a more public burn on Meta’s Threads — the Twitter/X rival that sparked this whole thing to begin with — saying: “I think we can all agree that Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on…If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”
It was unclear what the two billionaires now plan to do with their spare time, if not fight each other.
In completely unrelated news, fellow mega-billionaire and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -0.11% founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancée announced a $ 100 million donation Friday to Maui wildfire relief efforts.